Burning CDs on an IDE CD-RW

This article describes how I use cdrecord to burn
CDs on my IDE CD-RW. I also have a SCSI CD-RW; cdrecord – writing your own CDs describe
how I use the SCSI drive with cdrecord.
My thanks to Pav Lucistnik for his help in understanding the problem and working with
me to get things running.
It was a holiday Monday in Ottawa, when it was decided that it was time to move the rack to the other side of the basement.
The goal was to make more usable space. It difficult to get the rear of the rack, and to the shelves behind the rack.
The idea was to swap the rack and the shelve, rotating both 90 degrees in the process. I knew I’d have to move some
cables. When it was first suggested that I move the rack, it was about 1:00 pm. I said it’d probably take 5 hours to move
it. I wasn’t wrong. There’s still a few things that need to be set up, but for the most part, the LAN is up and running
and everything is in much better shape than it was before.
I took the opportunity to give each machine a thorough cleaning, getting rid of all the dust inside and on the
fans and power supplies. It was then that I [re]discovered that one of my lesser used machines contained a CD-RW.
I moved it from that machine to polo and removed the dead[?] DLT drive that had been sitting there unused
since I started having trouble with it and moved to an external DLT drive.

How FreeBSD sees the drive

The machine named polo is my work horse. I do all my FreeBSD Diary, FreshPorts,
FreshSource, BSDCan, etc, work on that computer.
It is running FreeBSD 4.11 STABLE. That sounds old, now that FreeBSD 6.1 is out.
When I first booted up the box with the CD-RW in the system, I found this:

When I showed this to Pav, he said PIO can only push 4x speed, which makes it pretty slow. He said that using
atacontrol I should be able to use UDMA33 instead.
Sure enough, the following command changed everything: